Plate 3. The alchemical androgyne. "Aurora consurgens," Ms. Rh 172,
Zentralbibliothek Zürich.
Plate 4. The green lion swallowing the sun. Arnold of Villanova,
"Rosariura philosophorum" (1550), Ms. 394a, f. 97, Kantonsbibliothek
(Vadiana), St. Gallen.
Plate 5. "Sol niger: the nigredo"; from J.D. Mylius, "Philosophia
reformata" (1622). Reproduced by C.G. Jung in Gesammelte Werke,
publ. Walter-Verlag.
Within the context of the alchemical paradigm, it is critical reason that appears meaningless, and actually rather stupid, in its attempt to rob significant images of their meaning. Thus, in the example given in Chapter 1, if I dream that I am my father and that I am arguing with him, it is irrelevant that this is not logically or empirically possible. What is relevant is that I awake from the dream in a cold sweat and remain troubled for the rest of the day; that my psyche is in a state of civil war, torn between what I want for myself and what my (introjected) father wants for me. To the extent that this dilemma remains unresolved, I shall be fragmented, un-whole; and since (Jung believed) the drive for wholeness is inherent in the psyche, my unconscious will send out dream after dream on this particular theme until I take steps to resolve the conflict. And because life is dialectical, so too will be my dream images. They will continue to violate the logical sequences of space and time, and to represent opposing concepts that, on closer examination, prove to be pretty much the same.
Plate 6. "The sun and his shadow complete the work," from Michael Maier,
"Scrutinium chymicum" (1687). Reproduced by C. G. Jung in "Gesammelte
Werke," publ. Walter-Verlag.
Jung's specific contribution, both to the history of alchemy and to depth psychology, was the discovery that patients with no previous knowledge of alchemy were having dreams that reproduced the imagery of alchemical texts with a bewildering similarity. In his famous essay "Individual Dream Symbolism in Relation to Alchemy," Jung recorded a series of one such patient's dreams and produced for nearly every dream a separate alchemical plate that duplicated the dream symbols in an unmistakable way.19 Inasmuch as Jung claimed that others had produced a similar set of dream images while undergoing the individuation process, Jung was forced to conclude that this process was indeed inherent in the psyche and that the alchemists, without really knowing exactly what they were doing, had recorded the transformations of their own unconscious which they then projected onto the material world. The gold of which they spoke was thus not really gold, but a "golden" state of mind, the altered state of consciousness which overwhelms the person in an experience such as the Zen satori or the God-experience recorded by such Western mystics as Jacob Boehme (himself an alchemist), St. John of the Cross, or St. Theresa of Avila. Far from being some pseudo-science or protochemistry, then, alchemy was fully real -- the last major synthetic iconography of the human unconscious in the West. Or, in Norman O. Brown's terms, "the last effort of Western man to produce a science based on an erotic sense of reality."20
Alchemy's rejection as a science, in Jung's view, coincided with the repression of the unconscious characteristic of the West since the Scientific Revolution -- a repression that he saw as having tragic consequences in the modern era, including widespread mental illness and orgies of genocide and barbarism.21 Thus Jung believed that the failure of each individual to confront his own psychic demons, the part of his personality he hated and feared (what Jung called the "shadow"), inevitably had disastrous consequences; and that the only hope, at least on the individual level, was to undertake the psychic journey that was in fact the essence of alchemy. In the cryptic words of the seventeenth-century alchemist and Rosicrucian, Michael Maier: 'The sun and his shadow complete the work' (see Plate 6).22 The creation of the Self lies not in repressing the unconscious, but in reintroducing it to the conscious mind.
Armed with this analysis, Jung found that the peculiar imagery represented in alchemical texts suddenly made sense. The "Ourobouros" of Plate 2, for example, a symbol that occurs (in one form or another) in almost every culture, represents the achievement of psychic integration, the unification of opposites. Green is the color of an early stage of the alchemical process, whereas red (the 'rubedo,' as it was called) is that of a later one. Hence beginning and end, head and tail, alpha and omega, are united. The gold, or the Self, inherent from the first, is finally separated out. The world is the same, but the person has changed. As T. S. Eliot put it in "Little Gidding":
We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.
The dialectical nature of reality, which was embedded in the theory of resemblance, was captured in alchemy by pictures of androgynes (Plate 3), hermaphrodites, and brother-sister marriages or sexual unions. The conjunction of opposites occurs in the alchemical alembic, where lead is seen to be gold in potentia, where mercury is both liquid and metal, where what is volatile (represented by the rising eagle) becomes fixed, and what is fixed (the dead eagles at the bottom) volatile.
The danger of the work is the point of Plate 4, which depicts a green lion attempting to eat or swallow the sun. As already indicated, green is an early stage of the process, where the raw, vegetative force of the unconscious is released and the conscious mind feels itself in danger of being devoured. The alchemical slogan, "Do not use high-grade fires," is appropriate here. The cycle of sublimation and distillation is slow and infinitely tedious, as are all the alchemical operations, and any attempt to hasten the process will only prove abortive. The danger in tapping the unconscious is that one will get more than one bargained for; that the repressed unconscious will overwhelm the conscious as a hole is poked in the dike separating the two. This phenomenon is well known to many psychiatrists, as well as to many people who have studied yoga, meditation, or have experimented with psychedelic drugs ("high-grade fires").23 The person in search of integration may be permanenently scared off, or forced to undertake his or her search from the very beginning. At the very worst, the eruption of unconscious information can dismember the soul, result in psychosis.24 The alchemical process is often summed up in the phrase 'solve et coagula'; the persona is dissolved (on the psychic level) so as to enable the real Self to coagulate, or come together. But as R.D. Laing points out in "The Politics of Experience," there is no guarantee that this Self will coagulate; indeed, such a result may be especially unlikely in a culture that is terrified of the unconscious and rushes to drug the individual back into what it defines as reality.25 Even the relatively alchemical culture of the Middle Ages was keenly aware of such danger, as Plate 4 indicates; and it was part of the alchemical opus to "tame" the green lion, or "cut off his paws" -- an act that (in material terms, from our point of view) consisted in touching sulfur with mercury or boiling it in acid for an entire day. If this taming were not carried out, the breakthrough of the unconscious, the dissolution of the ego, the collapse of the subject/object distinction, the sudden conviction that there is a Mind behind phenomenal appearances -- this single, unified flash of light could catapult the practitioner into heaven or hell, depending on his or her makeup and the particular circumstances. Hence another crucial alchemical slogan: 'Nonnulli perierunt in opere nostro' -- "not a few have perished in our work."
Finally, Plate 5 represents the first phase of the work, the 'nigredo,' in which the lead is dissolved and the solution becomes black. This is the "dark night of the soul," the point at which the persona has been dissolved and the Self has not yet appeared on the horizon. Hence the skeleton, the death of the ego, and the black sun ('sol niger'), representing acute depression. The "shadow" has now completely eclipsed the conscious ego. In "The Divided Self," Laing quotes the writing of a schizophrenic patient who, with no previous knowledge of alchemy, uses the phrase "black sun" to describe her way of experiencing the world. But in dialectical fashion, lead contains the nugget of gold, and the skilled alchemist can bri
ng about the transmutation by careful attention to his experiments. Hence the concluding line of Laing's book: "If one could go deep into the depth of the dark earth one would discover 'the bright gold,' or if one could get fathoms down one would discover 'the pearl at the bottom of the sea.' "26
Jung's analysis of alchemy is brilliant, and he produces provocative evidence that the alchemists were quite deliberate about the psychic aspect of their work. 'Aurum nostrum non est aurum vulgi,' they write; "our gold is not the common [i.e., commercial] gold." 'Tam ethice quam physice'; "as much moral as material." Or as one alchemist, Gerhard Dorn, candidly put it: "Transform yourselves into living philosophical stones!" Thus Jung was able to claim that what was "really" taking place in the alchemist's laboratory was the psychic process of self-realization, which was, then projected onto the contents of the furnace or alembic. The alchemist thought he made gold, but of course he didn't; rather, he made some concoction that, due to his altered state of consciousness, he called "gold."
This hypothesis is a veiy attractive one, especially since we know that in the course of their work alchemists practiced a number of techniques that can produce these altered psychic states: meditation, fasting, yogic or "embryonic" breathing, and sometimes the chanting of mantras. These techniques have been practiced for millennia, especially in Asia, for the express purpose (in our terms) of breaking down the divide between the conscious and unconscious parts of the mind. They strip the person of mundane desires, enabling him to penetrate another dimension of reality; and as Western science is just beginning to discover, they are certainly efficacious in physiological terms, especially if we adopt the (to me, quite reasonable) position that soul is another name for what the body does. It is easy to assume that the psychic aspect is the reality, and the material aspect deluded or irrelevant.
Unfortunately, Jung's interpretation does not tell us anything about what the alchemist actually did with his pots and alembics. Instead, it extracts from his activity the portion that we find comprehensible, and discards the rest. Such an interpretation is, in short, the product of a modern scientific consciousness, assuming as it does that matter was forever the same, and that only mind (concepts of matter) changed. But the alchemical world view simply did not construct reality in our terms. The subject/object distinction was already blurry in the first place, and thus such an interpretation of reality makes no sense, for "projection" assumes a sharp dichotomy that the alchemist did not make. Obviously the alchemist was doing something; but the projection argument, although an improvement over the standard textbook version, still takes him less than seriously. The goal of magical practice was to become a skillful practitioner, not a self-realized being. The quotes from Dorn and other alchemists cited above are not typical, and they date from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the scientific Revolution was relentlessly driving a wedge between matter and consciousness. For most of its history, alchemy had been perceived as an exact science, not a spiritual metaphor. If we succumb to Jung's formulation, we do so because of our inability to enter into a consciousness in which the technical and the divine were one, a consciousness in which finding a science of matter was equivalent to participating in God; Thus, Jung's formulation begs the question, for it is that very consciousness that we seek to penetrate. The very modernity of the projection concept precludes this possibility. The problem can only be solved (if at all) by trying to recreate the actual procedures of the discipline, and learning what the alchemist was doing in material terms.
Alchemy was first and foremost a craft, a "mystery" in medieval terminology, and all crafts, from the most ancient of times, were regarded as sacred activities. As Genesis tells us, the creation or modification of matter, the crux of all craftsmanship, is God's very first function. Metallurgy was intentionally compared to obstetrics: ores were seen to grow in the womb of the earth like embryos. The role of the miner or metalworker was to help nature accelerate its infinitely slow tempo by changing the modality of matter. But to do so was to meddle, to enter into sacred territory, and thus, down to the fifteenth century, the sinking of a new mine was accompanied by religious ceremonies, in which miners fasted, prayed, and observed a particular series of rites. In a similar fashion, the alchemical laboratory was seen as an artifidal uterus in which the ore could complete its gestation in a relatively short time (compared to the action of the earth). Alchemy and mining shared the notion, then, that man could intervene in the cosmic rhythm, and the artisan, writes Mircea Eliade, was seen as "a connoisseur of secrets, a magician. . . . " For this reason, all crafts involved "some kind of initiation and [were] handed down by an occult tradition. He who 'makes' real things is he who knows the secrets of making them."27
From these ancient sources came the central notion of alchemy: that all metals are in the process of becoming gold, that they are gold in potentia, and that men can devise a set of procedures to accelerate their evolution. The practice of alchemy is thus not really playing God -- though the notion is certainly latent in the Hermetic tradition -- but is, to continue the obstetrical metaphor, a type of midwifery. The set of procedures came to be called the "spagyric art," the separating of the gross from the subtle in order to assist the evolution and obtain the gold that lay buried deep within the lead. "Copper is restless until it becomes gold," wrote the thirteenth-century mystic Meister Eckhart;28 and although Eckhart may have had something more Jungian than metallurgical in mind, the alchemist, as we have stated repeatedly, made no such distinctions, but (in our terms) concentrated on his reagents and let nature (both human and inorganic) take its course.
What, then, were the procedures? Reading alchemical texts, the first thing one discovers is that there is very little unity of opinion on the subject. Transmutation consisted in the following set of operations: purification, solution, putrefaction, distillation, sublimation, calcination, and coagulation. However, the order and content of them is unclear, and not all alchemists employed all the techniques. Circumstances, especially the nature of the ores, always seemed to alter the methods. Hence what is agreed upon in terms of procedure is very general, consisting only of the basic outlines. Mercury is the dissolver, the active principle of things, and in fact had been used from the earliest times as a wash in gilding, to extract gold from other minerals. Sulfur (also called the green lion) is a coagulant, the creator of a new form. One must first perform the dissolution of the metal to the 'materia prima' and then recrystallize, or coagulate, this formless substance. If done correctly, gold will be the result. 'Solve et coagula' meant reduction to chaos -- a watery solution, a primal state -- followed by fixation into a new pattern.
In fact, the process was rarely this straightforward. The very delicacy of the procedure meant that it could be thrown off by the slightest mistake. Furthermore, it was central to the tradition that each student must learn this complex procedure by himself. There was no standardized recipe that could be handed on, but rather an elaborate practice that required a profound commitment. The variable factors were thus legion; failure rather than success was the rule. A number of intermediate steps, such as putrefaction, distillation, sublimation and calcination, normally had to be employed; and clearly, the terse formula 'solve et coagula' expressed only an ideal
Sometimes, the metal first had to be made to decay, or putrefy. The stink of this process came from hydrogen sulfide (the odor of rotten eggs), which was prepared and then passed through metallic solutions to obtain various colors (in the Middle Ages, colors and odors were substantial entities, not secondary qualities). Or, an evaporable substance would have to be extracted from its mixture so as to obtain it in a pure state. Sulfur, in particular, was obtained in this way. Hence, the long and exacting process of sublimation that in turn necessitated the complementary process of distillation, or filtering. Finally, if a metal would not dissolve, calcination was employed to convert it to a soluble oxide so that the processes of solution and separation could be performed.29
That there are various psychoanal
ytic and religious correlates to these procedures is perhaps obvious. In a spiritual interpretation, all personalities (metals, ores) are potentially divine (golden), and are trying to reach their true nature, trying to transcend the weight of their past (lead). An old reality decays for me, I stink and feel rotten, but this change in matter is ultimately good, for it is a change in what matters. Old realities die, new things become my reality. The rigidity of my personality is dissolved, a new pattern is slowly allowed to coalesce. The ferocious desire for pattern itself is tamed, and I begin to look at my former pattern as just one possibility among many. I become less rigid, more tolerant. I see that all that really exists is fusability and creativity, which mercury represents. Mercury, or Hermes, the messenger of the gods, acts as "trickster" here, even though he is called "psychopomp," guide of the soul. As Freud realized, we have to be tricked into consciousness, see our true nature almost by accident, for example, through jokes or slips of the tongue. Mercury was also associated with glass, the vessel that enables one to see into it. The container of my problems is transparent: I come to see that my problems not only hold the solution, they are the solution. Thus R.D. Laing: "The Life I am trying to grasp is the me that is trying to grasp it."
The Reenchantment of the World Page 9